As of today, Friday, I’m up to 2015 in Prince Harry’s Spare. He’s already introduced a lot of nicknames for various British media figures and paparazzi, and from what I can tell, he loathed Piers Morgan and every single person in the Murdoch empire (especially Rebekah Brooks) for decades before he even met Meghan. I do wonder why Harry uses nicknames for so many media figures AND several of the senior staffers in the Windsor industrial complex. Is he trying to avoid being sued, or does he not want to give certain people the satisfaction of being named? I don’t know. But in case you were wondering about the Bee, Wasp and Fly, here’s an explainer:

Bee, Wasp and Fly, in Harry’s telling, are central to the operation — and to his jaundiced view of palace culture. They are at the apex of a sprawling hierarchy that he claims undermined him and his wife. It includes communications secretaries, ladies-in-waiting and a passel of junior aides who jockey on behalf of their royal bosses, sometimes to the detriment of other family members.

“I’d spent my life dealing with courtiers, scores of them,” Harry wrote. “But now I dealt mostly with just three, all middle-aged white men who’d managed to consolidate power through a series of bold Machiavellian maneuvers.”

Two people with ties to Buckingham Palace identified the courtiers as Edward Young, who served as private secretary to the queen; Clive Alderton, the private secretary to Charles; and Simon Case, who was private secretary to William and is now the government’s Cabinet Secretary, the highest post in the British civil service. The two people insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.

[From The NY Times]

Over the years, my belief has grown that Simon Case was one of several Tory political operatives placed in Kensington Palace to groom William for his kingship. Not just his kingship, though – “King William” will be a right-wing stooge, a useful idiot for the ultra-conservative political and media establishment in Britain. Meanwhile, Edward Young was moved into Buckingham Palace after a massive power struggle in 2017, around the time that Prince Philip retired from public life. Young was and is “Charles’s man.” In many ways, Meghan and Harry were legitimately set up to fail in real time, in 2018-2019, but in other ways, the intra-palace dysfunction pre-2018 meant that no matter what, Harry was going to be exiled, betrayed, used as a pawn and worse.

The way Harry talks about the three insectival figures is some of the harshest but elegantly-composed ridicule in the entire book. The Bee (probably Young) is identified as the prime mover in the Megxit deal, steering everything to the eventual denouement with the tireless energy of a honey bee seeking its pollen: “The Bee was oval-faced and fuzzy and tended to glide around with great equanimity and poise, as if he was a boon to all living things.”

The Fly, likely Case, had “spent much of his career adjacent to and, indeed drawn to, s***. The offal of government and media and wormy entrails, he loved it, grew fat on it, rubbed his hands in glee over it”. Of course, Case eventually went on to become Boris Johnson’s cabinet secretary, with more its fair share of political dirt to dine upon, and also became embroiled in the stinky old Partygate fiasco (which, if his sobriquet of The Fly is accurate, would also have been greatly to his taste). At any rate, miraculously still in post, Case has proved tricky to swat.

The Wasp, likely Alderton, Harry found the trickiest: “Because he seemed so weedy, so self-effacing, you might be tempted to push back, insist on your point, and that was when he’d put you on his list. A short time later, without warning, he’d give you such a stab with his outsized stinger that you’d cry in confusion. ‘Where the f*** did that come from?’”

[From The Independent]

As I said, I haven’t finished the book yet, but given what we knew at the time and given what we know now, I feel like the Bee, Wasp and Fly are nowhere near as competent and all-powerful as Harry imagines. I understand why he feels that way, and God knows, the courtier system needs to be exposed, examined and dismantled. But what I’m saying is: these dudes are terrible at their jobs. They always were. This was always an utter clownshow.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.